New York|For Police Departments, in City and Elsewhere, Court Oversight Is Not New

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For Police Departments, in City and Elsewhere, Court Oversight Is Not New

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In 2011, Nicholas G. Garaufis, a federal judge, ordered supervision of the New York Fire Department, shown responding to a fire on West 139th Street in Manhattan last month.CreditCreditDemetrius Freeman/The New York Times

There was no ambiguity about where Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg stood on having a federal monitor oversee any portion of the New York Police Department.

“This makes no sense whatsoever when lives are on the line to try to change the rules and hamper the police,” Mr. Bloomberg said in June. “You have to have clear responsibility, clear chains of command.”

Yet dealing with federal court oversight is not a novel experience for the city or the department.

In 1985, the department submitted to a court settlement giving a federal judge authority to oversee its investigations of political activity. The strictures of that oversight have changed over time, and were loosened substantially after the Sept. 11 attacks, but remain in place.

The Fire Department, called a “stubborn bastion of white male privilege” by a federal judge, has for the last three years been under the supervision of either a court-appointed monitor or a special master, charged with helping to carry out a plan to hire more minority firefighters.

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Mr. Garaufis described the monitor he put in place for the New York Fire Department as his “eyes and ears.”CreditChester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

That is just a small fraction of the time that the city’s Department of Correction has been under court supervision: a judge in the early 1970s ordered that the Tombs, the complex near Manhattan Criminal Court where inmates were held, be shut down because of abysmal conditions. When inmates were sent to Rikers Island, they sued over the conditions there. The resulting settlement led to a consent decree in the late 1970s that has kept Rikers Island under court supervision ever since.

Even mundane procedures often are vetted by the courts. For example, a federal judge’s order late last year dealt with how frequently light bulbs had to be changed at Rikers, to ensure inmates had enough light to read by.

Elsewhere across the country, a number of police departments have found themselves under federal court oversight, often in response to a broader range of alleged police misconduct than in the New York case. In Seattle, for instance, a monitor was brought in to address the incidence of discriminatory and baseless street stops of the public — the core complaint in the New York City case — as well as widespread problems with excessive force, particularly the use of batons and flashlights, often against people with mental illness.

Typically, judges rely on monitors or other court-appointed officials to ensure that the police are actually following the court-ordered changes.

Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis, for instance, described the monitor he put in place for the New York Fire Department as his “eyes and ears.”

“As someone with approximately 500 cases on his docket and a demanding trial schedule,” Judge Garaufis said in an interview, “it’s more efficient to utilize a monitor to hold follow-up teleconferences and meetings with attorneys for the city and the U.S. Justice Department concerning implementation of my remedial order.”

In cases elsewhere with monitors for the police, the roles have varied.

“In some cases, the monitors will write the policies; in other cases they say to the police department, ‘You write the policies and I’ll review it,’” said Jeffrey Fagan, an expert witness for the plaintiffs in the current New York case.

In rare circumstances, judges have permitted monitors or other officials they put in place to take a larger degree of operational control over a police department. In Oakland, Calif., for instance, where the Police Department submitted to federal court oversight about a decade ago, a federal judge has been dissatisfied with the department’s progress. Last year, the judge named a compliance director, in addition to a monitor, and granted him broad authority to, in effect, run the department.

Thomas Frazier, the compliance director, is a former Baltimore police chief. He has the power to impose policies as well as to promote and demote officers.

But legal experts say the Oakland case, which began with a lawsuit over the behavior of a group of rogue officers known as the Riders, is unusual. They also say that the ways courts have used monitors to oversee the police elsewhere may hold few lessons for New York, because most cities agreed to a monitor as a condition for settling a lawsuit or an investigation by the Justice Department.

In New York, however, lawyers for the city have resisted the imposition of a monitor.

“In those other cases, monitors are put in place as part of settlement agreements to solve a problem, where here there is great resistance to the notion there is actually a problem,” said Steven Banks, the attorney in chief for the Legal Aid Society in New York, which is also suing the Police Department over the stop-and-frisk tactics in a separate case.

“When you have a bureaucracy, such as this Police Department, which operates with a we-never-make-mistakes perspective, the role of the monitor is to actively bring about reform and assist the court in creating a framework for bringing the agency into compliance,” Mr. Banks added.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: For Police Departments, in City and Elsewhere, Court Oversight Is Not New. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe